"Time will be back in joint when we meet again," says one of the lovers in Mikhail Shishkin's novel The Light and the Dark. Shishkin is one of Russia's greatest living writers – the only one to have won all three of his country's big literary prizes – and his epistolary novel takes a metaphysical approach to life, love and war. He talks to us about the corruption of Russia, why literature is freedom and how, despite its temporal disjunctions, The Light and the Dark is really a simple love story.
Time and matter are among the issues challenged by an earlier generation of fictioneers, the comics writers of the 1930s. The physicist James Kakalios explains how the creators of Spiderman, Batman and a host of other superheroes pre-imagined many of the key discoveries of quantum physics.
Then we turn to Argentina, where the novelist Patricio Pron investigates his own family's troubled past in an exploration of the legacy of dictatorship.
Reading list
The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin (Quercus)
My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron (Faber)
The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios (Duckworth)
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